The Environmentalism of Wall-E

The decade’s most powerful environmental film doesn’t star Al Gore or Greenpeace activists, but a trash-compacting, Hello Dolly-loving robot with a cockroach for a best friend.

Backdropping the Chaplin-esque romantic robot comedy is a barren Earth smothered in junk, deserted but for the movie’s eponymous hero, who is fated to compress garbage under sandstorm skies until his battered processors wind down.

When Wall-E meets the not-so-subtly-named Eve — Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator — love is as inevitable and precious as a seedling that emerges, against all odds, from the waste. But overriding Eve’s heart is her prime directive, and Wall-E hitches a ride as she takes the sprout to her ship.

(The unsullied starscape into which they burst from the Earth’s satellite-encrusted atmosphere is a moment of visual bliss and a reminder of the inspirational transcendence of space, however light-polluted our view now may be.)

Here the movie takes a mythological jump: the seedling is an olive branch delivered to a vessel waiting, like Noah’s ark, for word of land.
Aboard it, however, are not two of every different thing, but endless numbers of the same thing — people living in consumer coccoons provided by the Buy’N’Large corporation.

Promised that "There’s No Need to Walk!" by By’N’Large’s ubiquitous billboards, the couchbound exiles spend their days in a haze of flat-screened entertainment and oversized sodas. In a perfect metaphor for the lazy thoughtlessnes that ultimately ruined their planet, they’re literally too lazy to carry their own weight.

A whiff of puritanism and smugness is soon evident, and I was reminded of Freeman Dyson’s description of environmentalism as secular religion. Any religion is prone to orthodoxy and dogma — but just as some religious practices are simple common sense, so are the tenets of environmentalism.

People rely on other Earthly life for both survival and pleasure; our habits affect it in self-defeating ways. I’m willing to accept on faith the universal poignance of the ship captain’s remarks upon return: "It looks like Earth. But where’s the blue sky? Where’s the grass?"

Wall-E creator Pixar has disavowed the movie’s environmental overtones, and little wonder. Parent corporation Walt
Disney is the essence of inoffensive, all-inclusive and merchandise-friendly branding. But even if its bubble-wrapped tie-ins end up clogging our great-grandchildren’s landfills, Wall-E‘s point is no less potent. And if your kids want Wall-E toys, buy them a planter and some seeds.